Rating: B
In some senses this episode is a disappointment, since the crew from The Eminence in Shadow doesn’t appear at all. That, however, is more than made up for by the utter disaster that a Home Economics class on cooking turns into, and I have to give particular credit to the series for the novel way it creates such a disaster.
If a class activity is going to go utterly awry, there’s no better person to lead it among the school’s staff than the little-used Wiz, a KONOSUBA recurring character who had a couple of appearances in s2 as the school’s nurse. This is also an ironic choice since she’s actually every bit as undead as Ains is (she’s a lich), but irony is the lifeblood of this series so it’s all good. In her source world she also has a reputation for being largely incompetent as a magic shopkeeper (Vanir, the masked fellow, tries hard to rein her in as Wiz’s assistant), partly because she tends to overdo things and partly because she has a tendency to accidentally foist cursed items on customers. Both foibles are clearly in play here.
Naturally we get the normal mixes of eccentric personalities at each cooking station, but unlike many similar episode in other series, this one is less about the process of cooking and more about the results. Hence the real action doesn’t happen until everyone sits down to eat. The pasta being so fresh that it’s literally alive was a pretty funny joke to begin with, as was the way various characters don’t let any sentiment about it being alive get in their way of cooking it. The true coup de grace, though, is the follow-up joke that the once-living pasta is now zombie pasta, and that it animates to form hostile zombie pasta monsters which must be fought (or in Aqua’s case, fled from). In a setting where undead are part of the class, this actually seems quite fitting.
Laced throughout this are a few jokes which require more extensive knowledge of the source material. Tanya complaining early on about “drowning in pasta” once again is a reference to the Saga of Tanya the Evil OVA episode Operation Desert Pasta released in 2021, the franchise’s only light-hearted endeavor, which had the 203rd Aerial Battalion stuck in desert warfare and having their raids for food supplies mistaken for grand tactical plans as they went around gathering ingredients to make pasta – a lot of pasta. Lt. Serebryakov is also notorious for an appetite that isn’t hindered by any circumstance, so her being tempted to eat the collapsed zombie pasta at the end is completely in character. Aqua fleeing from undead is a specific reference to one incident from KONOSUBA s2 where she’s chased by a horde of undead in a dungeon (although I think this was a recurring joke, IIRC).
The other knock on this episode is that it seemed much more reliant on voiced-over still images than normal, although this was partly balanced out by a few cases of background animation. On the balance, though, it didn’t lack for fun quotient.
USA Anime 